World of Warcraft Patch 5.1 PTR Official Notes

The official PTR notes for the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 5.1 have been posted by Blizzard. I commented on patch 5.1’s changes in a previous post, but wanted to highlight a few other announcements now that we have confirmed details.

Scenarios

In a semi-hidden announcement, there will be a “Black Temple” Scenario. This is one of the things that I have wanted in the game for so long: the ability to experience raid content with a smaller group. I spent weeks farming old world raids and dungeons before my hiatus. I was completing tier sets left and right, getting achievements, and valuable loot for folks leveling up or stashing away Transmog gear.

There are no written details yet about this particular Scenario, but an image was put up on MMO Champion, along with other Scenario maps.

Black Temple Scenario Image from MMO Champion

General

Two new factions will be added for the Pandaren Campaign: “Operation: Shieldwall” for Alliance and “Dominance Offensive” for Horde. Players will be able to slay opposing faction NPCs to earn commissions that will upgrade their own faction’s base. This reminds me a lot of Halaa in Nagrand, which became abandoned fairly early on during The Burning Crusade.

Pet Battles

Battle Stones will be introduced to the game. These are bind-on-equip tokens that can be used to upgrade the quality of pets by individual pet or pet class. Battle Stones will be obtainable as a “drop” from a pet battle and from completing quests from pet trainers.

The in-game Pet Journal also gets a decent overhaul, allowing for the viewing of pet rarity level, the addition of advanced filtering options, and the ability to show where various pets are from. For example, you’ll be able to filter by a particular zone, and view all the pets you have and, more importantly, don’t have.

A couple of other interesting changes regarding pets and the Darkmoon Faire were announced. Pet Battle daily quests will be added to the Dark Moon Faire, rewarding players with a new pet, the Darkmoon Eye. Additionally, two new battle pets will be added to Darkmoon Island and can be captured and added to your Pet Journal.

Brawler’s Guild

More details about this super secret, underground brawling society have been revealed. Kind of. What we know is you will be able to fight NPCs in some way in some kind of PvE environment. To me, this is Pet Battles for folks that don’t want to play Pet Battles, or admit that they play and enjoy Pet Battles. As with most features in the game, rewards and achievements will be yours as you “level up” through the Brawler’s Guild. Most importantly, “If this is your first night at Brawler’s Guild, you have to fight.”